Babylon

Babylon is the great original of cities — the Mesopotamian capital whose name still means splendour. The reconstructed Ishtar Gate glows in blue-glazed brick, a fragment of a city that once ruled the known world.

Here the code of Hammurabi stood, and here the Hanging Gardens — real or imagined — fixed paradise in the world's imagination. A visit to Babylon is a conversation with the very beginnings of the urban idea.